Grade Your Site
When it comes to having a successful real estate website, there are really five different factors that you need to maximize, or Five Steps to Success:
- Design: The branding, navigation, and functionality of your website
- Content: Giving people reasons to come to the website, to stick around, and to come back
- Lead Capture: Collecting contact information from your visitors
- Lead Conversion: Turning those email addresses into conversations
- Traffic: Getting people to come to your site
Every website has strengths in some of these aspects, and weaknesses in other. By maximizing ALL of the first four, you'll find it doesn't take as much traffic to be successful with your website. We call this process Website Optimization (not to be confused with Search Engine Optimization).
How does your site measure up? Take a look at my "Grading Scale" below to get an idea of your site's strengths and weaknesses, and what direction you should go to improve it.
Website Design
- When you first pull up your homepage, it is immediately clear what area you work in (city/ies PLUS state) and that this is a real estate website.
- The pictures and colors of the site accurately reflect your area and appeal to your target market.
- From the homepage, you can quickly (within 6-8 seconds) find access to a Home Search, to Listings, to Area Information, and to Real Estate Information.
- Like-buttons across the homepage are grouped together and follow a progressive order, with the most important information coming first.
- Buttons going down the left side of the interior pages are also grouped together and follow a progressive, logical order.
- Your Drip Email "Global Template" branding matches your Homepage branding.
- Bonus Point: Homepage is visually stunning and sets you apart from your competition
Score:
- 6-7: Great work! You've got a solid, consistent design and a site that is easy to navigate and appealing to visitors.
- 4-5: Almost there. With just a couple of tweeks, you'll have a very solid design.
- 0-4: Needs improvement. Get in touch with a marketing coach at Z57 and we can help you make appropriate changes to your website to make it easier to navigate and to clearly reflect your brand, your area, and your target market.
Get Started on Website Design
Website Content
- You have MLS access on your website.
- You have a page populated with yours or borrowed listings.
- Information on the main pages is very customer-centric (focused on real estate and the area, not on the agent).
- You have information about the area that gives people an overview of what it's like to live there, what there is to do there, moving help, demographic information, school data, etc.
- You have mortgage information: calculators, rates, getting prequalified, etc.
- You have information about the Buying process (checklists, etc).
- All information is accurate and up-to-date.
- Bonus Point: You have information that is not readily available on most competitors' websites in your area and gives visitors a reason to bookmark your site.
Score:
- 7-8: Great work! There is plenty on your website to keep people interested and coming back on a regular basis, and you keep it updated on a regular basis. Both your users and search engines appreciate it.
- 4-6: Almost there. You've got some good information, but your site probably needs a little more of a personal touch. Check out some of these suggestions to take your site to the next level.
- 0-3: Needs improvement. You have a lot of opportunity to make the site truly yours and stand out from your competition. A marketing coach can give you some specific suggestions based on your area and your target market to help you get started.
Website Content Ideas and Suggestions
Lead Capture
- Registration is required in order for users to access the MLS Search.
- Users can clearly see the value in registering on your site and therefore will be willing to do so.
- When users request more information about a listing they are looking at, that request goes directly to you and not to the listing agent or your broker.
- Users can sign up to receive Automatic Listing Alerts by Email.
- Users can see comparisons of homes that have sold in their neighborhood (like Instacompare).
- A "Contact Me" or "Email Me" link is prominently displayed.
- Bonus Point: You have a form that will appeal directly to a special target group (ie. foreclosures, investors, FSBOs, etc).
Score:
- 6-7: Great work! You have a pretty solid system for capturing contact information, and you are offering enough in return to make it worth your users' while.
- 4-5: Almost there. You should hopefully be seeing a decent traffic-to-lead conversion rate from your website, but there are definitely a couple additional strategies you could try implementing to improve those numbers.
- 0-3: Needs improvement. You probably aren't seeing very many leads come from your site regardless of how much traffic you have. The answer probably isn't more traffic, although that is usually the first thing we assume. Try implementing the strategies listed above and see what happens. Contact a marketing coach for some one-on-one assistance.
Maximize Your Lead Capture
Lead Conversion
- You have a drip email system in place to automatically keep in touch with your leads over time.
- Users have the ability to sign up for automatic Listing Alerts by email (through an IDX solution or through the MLS).
- You have a computer database to keep track of your contacts and organize your leads into "Hot", "Warm", "Cool", and "Cold" so you can prioritize your followup.
- You always contact leads within 24 hours whether by phone or email, or both.
- You contact your leads between 5-10x within the first 30 days with valuable, helpful information to build rapport.
- Your followup contains direct links with calls to action back to your website to point out new/useful resources they may not have seen before.
- Bonus Point: Your MLS/IDX Solution and your drip email system allow you to track your leads' activity.
- Bonus Point: You have a consistent E-Newsletter that focuses on relavent, local information.
Score:
- 6-8: Great work! You are letting the website systems do a lot of the work for you, you know which leads are most active and can concentrate your attention appropriately.
- 4-5: Almost there. While you probably understand that internet leads require a different kind of followup than your traditional leads, you probably aren't maximizing the resources available to you to help turn email addresses into conversations.
- 0-3: Needs improvement. There's a good chance you have a hard time getting internet leads to respond to you and you might quickly give up on them. Those "bad leads" sitting in your database may actually hold some hidden treasures. Its never too late to start working your internet leads properly, and who knows what will happen?
The Nature of Internet Leads/Followup Strategies
Get Traffic
- Domain is prominently displayed on ALL marketing pieces (including email signature and voicemail). The first letter of each word is capitalized for ease of reading.
- You use appealing "Call to Actions" to drive people to the website.
- You manually enter your listings into the website to take advantage of our Free Listing Syndication with trulia, oodle, etc.
- You advertise your listings on Craigslist regularly and you use hyperlinks to point directly back to your website.
- You take advantage of networking opportunities by having your website linked on business partner websites (lenders, appraisers, inspectors, etc).
- You track your important statistics monthly to determine where your traffic is coming from and how they are interacting with your website.
- Bonus Point:You participate in an EFFECTIVE form of paid online advertising, like a good Pay Per Click program.
- Bonus Point:You utilize things like targeted, forwarding domains and landing pages to draw more people into the website and track where they are coming from.
- Bonus Point:You are optimizing your site for search engines, either on your own or professionally.
Score:
- 6-9: Great work! You are taking advantage of most of the free ways for getting traffic to your website, and maybe even some that you pay for. If you still feel your traffic programs are not working well for you, don't hesitate to get in touch with a marketing coach to analyze what is and what isn't helping you.
- 4-5: Almost there. If you are currently implementing all the strageties for getting free traffic to your website and are still looking for more, you are probably move to the next step and can start researching different paid online advertising out there like Pay Per Click and Buyerlink.
- 0-3: Needs improvement. Online advertising is a huge world with plenty of opportunities for free and paid ways to get traffic to your site. Keep in mind that not all online advertising is equal; talk to a marketing coach about best practices for your specific business and what has been working for other clients.
Free Advertising and Traffic Programs
Not happy with your score? Get started today. Request a professional website analysis from a Z57 marketing coach below. (Please remember to include your website address!)
